Film tackles national income inequality

Facing the world in his Mini Cooper, Robert Reich drives his way to communities around the world, including Plattsburgh, discussing economic fairness and inequality.

The film showing of “Inequality for All” took place at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Plattsburgh with discussion leader Colin Read, chair of the Economics and Finance Department at SUNY Plattsburgh and the economic outreach coordinator for the new Center for Public Service, along with 700 other watch parties watching the film and listening to the live telecom with Reich on March 27 at 9 p.m.

“Inequality for All” shows a passionate argument on behalf of the middle class, a class that has been struggling since the widening of the income gap in the late 1970s.

According to Reich’s film, 400 people have more wealth than half of the population. Those 400 people, known as the 1 percent, earn most of the wealth in the country while the middle class struggles.

“Unemployment and underemployment now are still quite bad in this period,” Read said. “It’s just such a waste of resources and really a waste of lives.

“They could make a big contribution, but if they’re unemployed, how can they?”

A chart featured in the film, showed the middle class’ household median income which is $50,000, going as low as $25,000 to as high as $75,000. While the upper class, however, earns from $380,000 from doctors and lawyers to $10 million and more from CEO’s of major corporations and athletes.

“There ought to be rules that don’t allow million dollar pay increases for cheap executives and that kind of nonsense,” said Lee Clark, attendee of the film and discussion.

Before this gap occurred, between 1947 and 1977 there was, as Robert Reich called it, a virtuous cycle. In this cycle, productivity grew, wages increased, workers bought more productive, companies hired more, tax revenues increased, workers became better educated and the government invested more. However, that soon changed.

When the widening of the income gap first started in 1978, it was caused by globalization and technology. Reich in his Wealth and Poverty class at the University of California at Berkeley took a poll of how the iPhone’s profits were divided up between countries. While most students thought the United States and China acquired most of the profits, it was actually Japan and Germany because of the creation of better products.

Even though wages decreased while productivity increased, society used three ways to cope with the flattening income and wages: women employment, overtime or longer hours or borrowing money. Those methods have since been exhausted.

“We’ve just gotta get more people educated and talking to each other in a way that we all can understand,” Read said. “We gotta figure out somebody who can get inside that 1 percent and have a conversation with them.”

According to the film, the 1 percent isn’t buying enough, thus not generating enough economic activity. Instead, they’re saving when they need to be spending because spending is what keeps the middle class going.

Today, the middle class suffers from debt, layoffs and pay cuts, some as bad as up to $12/hour. Also, tuition has increased since the 1960s when colleges, such as Berkeley, were free to today where just in-state admission costs $15,000.

The discussion that took place in Plattsburgh expressed how economic inequality was a very concerning matter to both the United States and the community itself.

“We need to invest more into the people and more into the working class and less in trying to use these little tricky, little gimmicky political solutions to put mandates on the really serious problems,” Read said.

“We have to be able to talk to people and then solve problems together,” said Nancy Lewin, member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Plattsburgh and co-host of event.

Currently, the United States is going through a vicious cycle consisting of wages stagnating, workers buying less, companies downsizing, tax revenues decreasing, the government cutting programs, workers being less educated and, of course, a rise in unemployment.

Reich, through his history being a cabinet member for Clinton, a best-selling author and a teacher, has been trying to get his message across the country that something needs to change in this economy in order to get things back on track, one of the reasons why the film was created.

“I’ve met him before,” Read said. “I used to work as a researcher at Harvard, and he was a professor at Harvard at the time.

“He’s a really interesting and fascinating guy.”

At the end of the film, Reich said words of encouragement to his class stating that even though things may not look very good right now, one of them, one of anybody in the U.S., could and would help bring the country back on track and solve the issue of economic inequality like how it was solved before.

As for the community of Plattsburgh, Read and members of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Plattsburgh hope to have more community discussions to attempt to make people come together and face important issues that are occurring today both in the community and the United States.

To learn more about Reich, go to http://robertreich.org/. Also, for more events put on by the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Plattsburgh, check out their website http://uuplattsburgh.org/.

“We can’t sit back and just be quiet,” said Mary-Alice Shemo, member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Plattsburgh and member of People for Positive Action. “We should speak up!”